Sino-Bodic

In terms of number of speakers, Tibeto-Burman vies with Indo-European for the title of the world's largest language family. Yet by comparison little is known of its past. In linguistic terms, eastern Eurasia has always been much more of a terra incognita than western Eurasia. Speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages occupy a vast area in the heartland of eastern Eurasia, but Tibeto- Burman peoples are by no means the only inhabitants of the Orient. Yet at one time it was believed that virtually all languages spoken by what was impressionistically called ‘the Mongoloid race’ or ‘Mongolian races’ belonged to a vast language family known as Turanian. In the middle of the last century, Friedrich Max Müller, a celebrated champion of this theory, divided the languages of the Old World into three language families.

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Michailovsky, Boyd. 1994. ‘Manner vs. place of articulation in the Kiranti initial stops’, in Kitamura, Hajime, Nishida, Tatsuo and Nagano, Yasuhiko (eds.), Current issues in Sino-Tibetan linguistics. Ōsaka: Organizing Committee of the 26th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, 59–78.

Miller, Roy Andrew. 1988. ‘The Sino-Tibetan hypothesis’, Bulletin of the School of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, lix/2: 509–540.

Müller, Friedrich Max. 1855. Languages of the seat of war in the East, with a survey of the three families of language, Semitic, Arian, and Turanian (frontispiece title: Max Mütter's Survey of languages) (second ed.) London: Williams and Norgate.

Sagart, Laurent. 1990. ‘Chinese and Austronesian are genetically related’.Paper presented at the 23rd International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (5 to 7 October), University of Texas at Arlington.

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Thurgood, Graham. 1985. ‘Pronouns, verbal agreement systems, and the subgrouping of Tibeto-Burmana’, in Thurgood, Graham, Matisoff, James Alan and Bradley, David (ed.), Linguistics of the Sino-Tibetan area: the state of the art—papers presented to Paul K. Benedict for his list birthday. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics: 376–400.